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Jackie Nordström has recently presented a new reading of the runes at the Ribe skull. She claims that the two words dvärg ‘dwarf’ and dvärgynja ‘female dwarf, dwarfess’ occur in the inscription, written tuiᴀrki and tuirkuniu (both words in dative singular). She transcribes them dværgi and dværgyniu, i.e. with æ, which in both cases is unlikely. Instead, the words should be transcribed as dwiargi and dwergynju – the first word with a breaking e > ia. Broken forms of this word are well attested in some Swedish dialects as djärg, järg or järv. In the end of the inscription the pronoun þaim probably is dative plural, referring forward to both the dwarf and the dwarfess.
This article deals with a runic inscription scratched into the plaster on one of the inner walls of the tower of Vallstena church on Gotland. The inscription was discovered in 1924 and is published as G 235b in the preliminary manuscript of the third volume of Gotlands runinskrifter, but with a very cautious reading and no interpretation. The present author argues that it can be read as so͡ltiọrurfir[ar]ṇoyiþr, which seems to render a runic cipher based on the rune names and spelling out the word stufan i.e. stuvan ‘the cottage’. This word appears also two times carved with runes on the same wall surface (stufan G 235c and stuf-‑ G 235e). It is not fully clear why this word was hidden in cryptic runes, but it might be some kind of pun referring to church towers used as hospices for pilgrims or temporary dwellings during trouble times.
The newly born definite article spreads along two paths – a theoretical discussion and a case study in Old Scandinavian
This article contains an investigation of the spread of the definite article in Old Scandinavian on its way towards obligatorification from the very scant use of the newly born article. On an overall level, it turns out that the process is significantly earlier in West Norse than in East Norse. The empirical analysis is preceded by a theoretical discussion of which referential categories there is reason to distinguish, alongside the (direct and indirect) anaphora, where the development is generally assumed to begin, as definite articles normally arise from demonstratives in anaphoric use. When it comes to the non-anaphoric NPs, it is argued, with inspiration from Löbner 2011, that there is reason to pay regard to whether or not the head noun expresses inherent uniqueness and/or relationality. This view is confirmed by the empirical analysis, which shows that scribes can be significantly more as well as significantly less inclined to use the definite article in NPs with such features than in NPs without. Moreover, this result suggests that definiteness marking does not progress strictly linearly along one single path, contrary to what various models in the literature presume (including the scale of uniqueness in Löbner 2011). Instead, a two-path model is proposed.
This article deals with the puzzling fact that the manuscript AM 28 8vo, ‘Codex runicus’, was chosen as base manuscript in the most recent scholarly edition of the old provincial law of Scania, prepared by Johs. Brøndum-Nielsen in 1933. Like all his predecessors as editors of the law, Brøndum-Nielsen wanted to use the manuscript which preserved the most archaic language available, and according to his own research in the nineteen twenties this language was not represented by Codex runicus, but by the totally neglected or misjudged manuscripts Stockholm B 69 and B 74. In a retrospective view of the scholarly editions of the law hitherto published (Stockholm 1676, Copenhagen 1853, Lund 1859 and Copenhagen 1933), Brøndum-Nielsen’s choice would rather seem to be the last stroke in a protracted Swedish-Danish ping-pong match concerning which manuscript of the law was the oldest and had the most archaic language. Inevitably, the only two contemporaries among the editors, the sensitive P.G. Thorsen (1853) and the belligerent C.J. Schlyter (1859), got into a rather unfortunate confrontation, also involving the solitary Danish philologist, Edwin Jessen. The article offers a brief presentation of editors as well as editions, and an attempt is made to identify the historical, ideological, scholarly and/or practical reasoning behind each choice, Brøndum-Nielsen’s in the 1933 edition included. – Codex runicus is introduced separately as a most important, although very tricky, player in the story.
Den fornsvenska Apostlagärningarna i den svenska bibelöversättningens historia
An Old Swedish translation of Acts of the Apostles is preserved in MS Stockholm, Kungliga biblioteket, A 110, which was written the year 1385 or some years after in the newly established birgittine Vadstena monastery. One part of Chapter 9, in which Saul is struck to the ground by God on his way to Damascus, also appears in two fifteenth century manuscripts in a collection of legends, most of them derived from Legenda aurea. This legend text has been believed to have been copied from the Acts translation (Ståhle 1940), but a close study reveals that the legend text likely predated the Acts translation and was incorporated in it. The time and place of of the Acts translation is discussed from various perspectives and it is suggested, in line with Anderssons’s (2001) interpretation of the MS A 110, that it was carried out for the use within the Vadstena monastery, inaugurated in 1384.
The Passive Constructions in the 16th and 17th century Danish and Swedish
The paper discusses the diachronic developments the passive voice constructions, morphological s-passive and periphrastic bli-passive, in closely related North Germanic languages, Danish and Swedish. The point of departure is the different distribution of the constructions, as well as their different semantics, in modern languages. The study is based on a corpus of late 16th and 17th century texts, which have been annotated for a number of factors connected with voice and tense. The results show that although the modern passive system is not yet fully formed in either language, by the end of the 17th century significant differences between the languages have already arisen, with respect to the distribution of the passive constructions. In particular, the results show that the Danish s-passive is found with modal verbs to a higher extent than the s-passive in Swedish. At the same time, the bli-passive in both languages is connected with animate subjects.